Hello friends! I'm very very very (x100000) excited to share that I've just sold my debut novel, Suicide Club, to Sceptre, Hachette in the UK and Henry Holt, Macmillan in the US. Rights have also sold to Modernista in Sweden and Bertrand in Portugal. It will be published in August 2018 and I hope you'll all read it!

I am absolutely over the moon about signing with both Sceptre and Henry Holt. We ended up having several publishers making offers (SURREAL, MIND STILL RECOVERING FROM BEING BLOWN) and ran auctions in the UK and US. Cash money aside, Sceptre and Henry Holt are both publishers with illustrious histories of publishing distinguished literary fiction dating back to the 1860s, including giants such as David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel, Robert Frost, Paul Auster and Noam Chomsky.

David Mitchell in particular was one of my big inspirations genre-wise in writing Suicide Club, so I'm hugely honoured and excited that my book will be published by his publisher! I pretty much haven't stopped pinching myself for a month now, ever since I had lunch with Sceptre editor extraordinaire Melissa Cox on my 29th birthday (Yes, we submitted the book 2 days before my birthday and I did meetings on the day itself. More on that another time...).

Giant thank yous to Samantha Lee and Vadim Kuklov for reading terrible first drafts and still being my biffles, to Melanie Garrett and Carol Barnes-Burrell for the endless encouragement and feedback, Joanna Briscoe for telling me she believed in me when I started writing the novel back in October 2015. To my amazing agent, Juliet Mushens, for taking me on, for the brilliant edits, encouraging cat pics and badass hustling.

And most of all, to Carl Jeanbart, who told me on one snowy night in 2009, in a dorm room in New York with blue linoleum floors and a sink, that what I should be doing with my life is writing fiction. I didn't believe it then, and there are many times that I still don't believe it now, but he always did. Thank you for being my coach, my editor, my biggest fan, my partner in everything.

The deal was covered in The Bookseller, BookBrunch and was also Publishers' Marketplace's Deal of the Day!

I've had many kind questions about when people will be able to order the book, and how you can get a signed copy. Sceptre expects that the UK/Commonwealth pre-order link should be ready some time next month and I'll definitely post it once it's available! As for signings, I'm hoping I'll be able to do events in London, New York and Singapore next summer (will exchange signed copies for a couch to crash on plzzz). For updates on pre-order/events, you can sign up to my mailing list here and I'll keep you posted!

In the meantime, because August 2018 feels like a century away, if you'd like a sneak preview of Suicide Club itself, you can read an excerpt of it here.